~ Exploring the human-canine bond

Patricia McConnell

I was very excited to discover that Patricia McConnell has her own blog, which I have added to my blog list (i.e. The Other End of the Leash). Her book of that title is one of the most important books I’ve read about dog behaviour, and specifically on understanding canine-human interaction. I strongly recommend the book to everyone who has a dog, or who interacts with dogs.

She also has a really interesting book on dog emotions, entitled For the Love of Dog. Another really great read. One thing I really love about this author and behaviourist is how she challenges the separation between animals and people. She clearly sees her dogs, and I think animals in general, as having the emotional and intellectual capabilities just like us. And she treats them with respect accordingly. This is something I feel very strongly about: that we are not really different from animals, we have just crated an artificial separation from them through our arrogance and self-centeredness. This is very much our loss, but animals suffer horribly as a result (we slaughter 58 BILLION per year to eat, nearly all of which lived their lives under horrific conditions). But I digress…

I was just reading through Patricia’s blog and enjoying it very much, and wanted to bring it to your attention if you haven’t already taken a look at it. I haven’t read very far into it, but there’s something very easy to relate to about the way she writes. I find this true of her books as well. I think it is because she comes across as being very humble and fallible, despite her expertise and experience.

Patricia McConnell is someone I would love to meet some day and have a conversation with. I already feel like I kind of know her a little, from the stories she has told about her dogs and her life on her farm. I cried like a baby when she lost Cool Hand Luke, as if I had known him myself. I love the photos of her sheep and the stories she tells about them and her dogs. How much she loves them, and how much she respects and admires them, really shines through.

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9 thoughts on “Patricia McConnell”

Hmm, I’ve read some Patricia McConnell and wasn’t blown away but maybe I should try again? Jellybean (the crazy heeler) has had a HUGE breakthrough!! Ove the last two days she has submitted to allowing THREE not-barries to pet her! That now means that I can reinforce her for letting people pet her until she views it as a desirable thing to do. All week I had been agonizing over whether I should learn more about homeopathy and try that, continue with what I was doing or even possibly start her on Buspar and boom all the sudden she let one of my client’s pet her!!

That’s really great about Jellybean, by the way! Perhaps she just needed more time? How old is she again? I believe that with sufficient time and repetition, most behaviours can be redirected or suppressed. Homeopathy can speed this up dramatically, which is why I recommend it, because it can help remove the reason for the behaviour in the first place. But it requires finding a good homeopath to work with, and they are few and far between. It is probably easier for most people to just use training. Very happy that you are enjoying some good progress at last!

As for Patricia McConnell, well, not everyone is going to find the same things inspiring! For me, her book taught me a lot about dog behaviour and helped me understand and watch for things I overlooked before. Like the innate desire for kids to hug and kiss, and how and why those very actions are perceived as aggression by dogs not used to kids. I now accept that a child under the age of around 6 is probably incapable of not trying to hug and kiss a dog, and so I don’t even try to work it out. Instead, I just prevent them from interacting with Mira and let them hug and kiss Kess, Hannah, and Ross under close supervision.

There’s also something about the way she writes that I really relate to. Maybe it’s because she’s also an academic and so puts things in ways that resonate with me. I don’t know. There’s just something about her books that make me really want to meet her, in a way that I don’t feel with Susan Garrett, for example. I find Susan to be brilliant but I don’t feel I really relate to her for some reason. Maybe it’s because she has different goals, i.e. her focus on training for competition is so intense while I am more interested in just doing stuff with my dogs. Plus you have to PAY so much for her knowledge. I feel excluded, I guess, because I don’t have an income bracket that allows me to take all her workshops etc. I was just reading her blog about all these people who attend camp after camp – these camps cost upwards of two months salary for me right now!!! How do people have this kind of cash to spend on training their dogs? All I can do is go out and put together some lawn chairs and rakes, or go into the woods and play on fallen trees, or offer to do chores around a farm in exchange for sheep time.

I love how Patricia McConnell talks about her sheep and herding and she seems to largely just do it for the pure joy of working with her animals, and not for trials etc. This is something I am actively working at achieving myself, so I think that’s why I feel I relate to her.

Since I actually have competed in agility and I have seen Susan trialing and have a frame of reference for all that I guess it is just more comfortable for me than PM’s sheep stuff. I’ve never trained a dog to herd so while I can see that Jellybean is MUCH more geared towards actual herding work than my malinois is, knowing that doesn’t help me much per se. I’ve been to a few stockdog trials and I even took a heeler out to Virgil Holland’s place for evaluation once. If he hadn’t moved up to Cincinnati, I might be more motivated to actually do some real herding with Jellybean because I have a feeling that that would center her in some way and thus give her more confidence in other things.

Jellybean will be 2 on May first so some of this might just be natural maturation but she would JUST panic when anyone came anywhere close to touching her and now all the sudden she’s okay with it! It was almost an absurd shift that suddenly she was mostly okay with people touching her. I can’t figure it out anymore than I could really figure out what the underlying issue was to begin with.

I also like the way Susan Garrett makes the things she knows more accessible to the general public. I can see how, as an academic, PM might appeal to you more though. Interesting 🙂

Herding is really hard to get into and takes a very long time to get up and running in. So it’s not something most people find a way to enjoy. I wanted to do herding for nearly 20 years before I finally had the chance. That is why I worked so darned hard at it, even when I wanted to quit. I refused to allow myself to give up. It took me about 1.5 years of training 1-3 times a week before I really started to get it. It is too bad that Virgil moved away from where you are as he would have been a fantastic asset.

Interesting about Jellybean changing at age two. I have observed this with many, many dogs now. They seem to change between 18-24 months. Often previously friendly dogs will become cranky or even aggressive, and at the same time, previously timid or reactive dogs will mellow out. Not sure why, but perhaps it’s similar to humans going from being a teenager to a twenty-something. How many neurotic, awkward teens have you seen become pretty normal adults? Perhaps the same happens with dogs! Mira has also mellowed a fair bit since turning two.

As for SG, I am indeed glad she shares her knowledge, even if you have to pay for it. I really enjoyed Shaping Success, and look forward to watching crate games tonight. I just wish her camps weren’t so darned expensive. I don’t know that I could ever justify paying what she charges, although I’m sure I’d get a ton out of them. I am only paying $200 for two camps with world class herding instructors and only 10 people or so in each camp. And this is for instructors flown in from other countries! But I guess if people will pay $700+ a weekend, she might as well charge it. Not a bad way to make a living! But it does keep her clientele to a fairly elite demographic, but I guess that’s what the DVDs and books are for: us poor slobs who can’t afford camp 🙂

Oh, pretty much all top agility handler’s camps cost that so I guess I just don’t think about it. I’m just used to being poor 😉 I guess I thought it was pricing herself as one of the top handlers and if she charged less then the agility elite wouldn’t be desperate to go to her camps?

I’ve trained dozens of dogs and I haven’t ever seen this abrupt of a shift at any point in their lives! But, I haven’t fooled much with border collies or really keen herding dogs since you are right that I have never had a driving desire to work dogs on stock, so maybe it is specific to that type of dog? Fancy began allowing other people to touch her around 24 months but there had been progress towards that for a full year and it wasn’t this “I’m going to completely freak out when anyone tries to touch me” then the next day, “okay now I will let people touch me.”

I don’t think it is cheap to actually take your dog to work with PM is it?

You know, I have never looked at other agility camps so I didn’t know that. I guess agility is just expensive, period. Maybe it won’t seem so expensive once I’m fully employed again, ha ha!! And I’m sure you’re right that PM is expensive too, although she deals with life and death stuff and puts herself in danger working with some of the dogs she works with (she works with aggressive dogs).

Herding is expensive too; you either have to get a farm and buy sheep, or pay for your instruction and sheep time to learn. I was very lucky in that I was able to earn my sheep time through barter by helping out on the farm. A friend of mine paid for every lesson and hour she spent on sheep and it cost her over $8000 just to get to novice level. I’m now hooked and desperately trying to find a way to get back to my addiction…

Regarding the personality shift at around age 2, I have seen it over and over in the dogs I’ve worked with. But they have been mostly border collies, so yes, that might have something to do with it. I used to think that it was a vaccine related issue as most dogs get their “boosters” around 18 months and not long after that a lot of problems surface. Now I think the shift happens anyway, made worse by vaccines in dogs who are sensitive to them. Border collies appear to be particularly vaccine sensitive, so perhaps that’s why I have observed such dramatic shifts for the worse at that age (onset of a lot of fear, aggression, reactiveness etc).

In Hannah and Mira, neither of whom received “boosters” (they are completely unnecessary and can be quite harmful) I still saw a little shift in each as they reached age two. Mira became more mellow and “normal” and Hannah became slightly bitchier with other dogs who get in her face. The changes were very minor, thank goodness. Hannah’s now over three and I’ve seen no further change.

So who knows what’s going on? But I do know that it is such a common thing, at least in border collies, that you would be wise to never buy a puppy out of a bitch or sire who is younger than 3 years old. In sheepdog circles there’s an old saying: “you should never breed a dog until it has as many years as it has legs under it.”

If you’re interested in reading more about challenging the separation between humans and animals, try Marc Befoff’s ‘The Emotional Lives of Animals’ in which he smartly points out one basic fact that many seem to have forgotten…that humans are animals.

He also defends anthropomorphization as natural – because after all, we are human so we try to explain the world how we experience it. (It’s not a bad thing – Look how disastrously our misinterpretation of the alpha roll turned out!)

The well being of animals is affected by how they feel and while humans all agree that they can tell when a dog or cat is happy, they often dismiss other emotions, especially negative ones like grief, as being fallacy.

Marc is a specialist in the study of animal emotions within the larger are of cognitive ethology, the study of animal minds and I’m sure you can find his book on Amazon.

I also had a comment about Jellybean – while common for dogs’ behavior to undergo change at around two, I don’t think it’s normal. I think often it happens to dogs who have felt insecure. (It happened to my sweet Bella who developed a strong case of redirected aggression.)

I’m glad to hear Jellybean is making progress, and her owner might be able to support her progress with flower essences. Most people I know have heard of bach flower essences – I use anaflora flower essences which are formulated especially for animals.

The cornerstone of the anaflora line is one called ‘Return to Joy’ (I call it the amoxicillin of essences 😉 because it addresses a wide spectrum of issues.) Just tap the bottle 2 or 3 times with the palm of your hand and put 3-5 drops in the water bowl each time you change the water. It’s ok if other animals drink it – if they don’t need it, it won’t have any effect on them. (Flower essences can never do harm, by the way)

Animals often experience profound changes quickly, some take longer and some just need to find the right formula 😉 Use until the bottle’s gone, and that’s it. You can check out the many many MANY essences available at http://www.anaflora.com.

Very interesting Beth! I might give it a go since I put special dental stuff in their water and have to change it completely every 24 hours.

I definitely want to check out the book you mentioned!

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SC, you’re going to have to tell me your name! I’ve looked over the site and I can’t find it anywhere! Anyway, Jellybean’s shift from fairly normal if not overly friendly puppy to completely terrified of everyone and everything DID coincide with a horrendous experience at a vet’s office I now absolutely will not enter for any reason and she WAS there for puppy shots and she is the only puppy I have followed all the protocols with since I generally get a puppy who has had one shot and give them another one myself around 3 months or so then take them in for a rabies vaccine at 4 months and consider them inoculated until I have to give another rabies shot for some reason to prove that my dog is properly inoculated.

All of this was happening right at the time when I found a huge lump on one of Fancy (my malinois)’s boobs and then found a truly wonderful vet who we are definitely sticking with as long as she will have us 🙂

The bad vet’s tech put 3 month old Jellybean in a dominance roll and proceeded to explain to me how with a “dog like this” I needed to do this every day to assert my dominance.

I said, “oh you have a cattle dog?”

“uh no”

“oh you’ve trained a lot of them?”

“uh no”

“Well I guess you haven’t read Coppinger either because pack theory has basically been debunked and I focus on using operant conditioning methods with my dogs. BTW, I had another cattle dog living with me for a year several years ago and I have personally trained a half a dozen of them.”

I know I was a total female dog but she was terrorizing my baby dog! When I went back to the lobby to pay I heard the vet lecturing some client on dominance as well…argh!

But since I have read Skinner and I *knew* Jellybean was having plenty of positive experiences with strangers, the idea of that one incident having a long-term effect on her didn’t make any sense to me but that COMBINED with the shot…now that could actually explain it. Because just as I have never seen a dog go from black to white the way Jellybean just has with suddenly being okay with not-barries touching her I have also never seen a puppy go from pretty okay to suddenly scared to death of everyone.

I know I am all over the map in this comment but I’ve always believed that because I was so focused on Fancy and her surgery and recovery after having the mammary gland removed that I just fell down on the job with Jellybean and she needed MORE socialization than I was giving her right at that exact moment.

I am inclined to always believe things are my fault (because I’m really that important 😉 but at the same time I didn’t have enough faith in my ability to get Jellybean through this issue through training alone.

LOL, I have never admitted what I consider my secret shame in this matter to anyone before! How silly is that?!?